Housing Sustainability Matters Number 6 - Sustainable Procurement
Show me the money!
Buying things has made its way to the heart of modern life. The choices you make are important for people and the environment. Everything has to be made from something. And some things are better than others. For example, you could buy a bottle of fruit juice in a plastic bottle or in a glass one. Both can be recycled, but each has a different environmental impact. Glass is derived from sand, plastic from oil. Each will consume different amounts of energy in manufacture, and in transport, and in recycling or disposal. Each raw material comes from a different country with different employment laws and different employment protection and different environmental standards. It gets so complicated, you may need some help…
Label nation
Here in the West, the label rules. But forget Mochino for a moment, ever heard of energy labelling? It's one thing that can help you unravel the complexities of the marketplace. Not all labelling schemes are similar, but at least there's a range of labels out there you can trust. For white goods the A-F energy rating (A is best); for food, the Soil Association and the Fairtrade mark; for cars you could look at miles per gallon and will soon have ratings like those for white goods; for homes there'll soon be energy labelling under the European Performance of Buildings Directive.
Hidden impacts
When asked whether you want to upgrade you mobile phone, do you think about it? "When you buy a mobile phone, a laptop or a games console you are buying tantalum capacitors. One of the metal's biggest sources is the Democratic Republic of Congo" according to Australian primatologist Ian Redmond. "This mining is destroying the vital forest habitats of the gorilla and the animals are being killed to feed the miners. The pace of mining for tantalum could contribute to the extinction of the gorilla inside 40 years".
Making sense of it
Like any goods, an electronic device has an impact in production, an impact in use and an impact in disposal. Closed loop recycling is the current vogue for minimising the impact of items we buy. If at the end of it's life, you recycle your mobile phone, the tantalum can be extracted and reused. If it goes into a new phone, the impact of that new phone's manufacture is greatly reduced. It can in turn be recycled - a closed loop, no longer causing such widespread damage.
Less is more
As complicated as it is, you might like to consider whether you really need it in the first place. Every cotton t-shirt is made up not only of the cotton, but the energy and resources that went into the manufacture of that cotton. 10,000 litres of water are consumed in the manufacture of the average cotton t-shirt, not to mention that cotton is the world's most polluting crop (unless it's organic). This water will have been consumed in a cotton producing country, like Kazakhstan for example, where access to water is so stressed, that the Aral Sea has shrunk by three quarters, threatening the livelihoods of whole nations that depend on it.
The Oracle
The simple fact is that when you buy something you are supporting a market. When you procure something for work it's worth thinking about whether a less damaging product or service can be used instead. As a consumer you have real power. London Borough of Lambeth employees will be familiar with the purchasing system Oracle. Make best use of the 'core list' which includes 86% of the most sustainable options available from Office Depot - like Evolve paper.
Recommended reading
1. carbonsense
2. www.fairtrade.org.uk
3. londonremade.com
4. Green Source Solutions
5. www.greenchoices.org
Feedback and back issues
Housing Sustainability Matters is a quarterly e-publication produced by Matt Prescott, Environmental Projects Officer, Lambeth Housing, t: 020 7926 3510, e: mprescott@lambeth.gov.uk.